A Blind-Mixing Scheme for Bitcoin based on an Elliptic Curve Cryptography Blind Digital Signature Algorithm
This addresses anonymity issues for Bitcoin users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing blind signature techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of Bitcoin mixers knowing user output addresses, which compromises anonymity, by proposing a centralized coin-mixing algorithm based on an elliptic curve blind signature scheme that prevents mixers from linking input and output addresses, with the method executing 10.5 times faster than RSA Coin-Mixing.
To strengthen the anonymity of Bitcoin, several centralized coin-mixing providers (mixers) such as BitcoinFog.com, BitLaundry.com, and Blockchain.info assist users to mix Bitcoins through CoinJoin transactions with multiple inputs and multiple outputs to uncover the relationship between them. However, these mixers know the output address of each user, such that they cannot provide true anonymity. This paper proposes a centralized coin-mixing algorithm based on an elliptic curve blind signature scheme (denoted as Blind-Mixing) that obstructs mixers from linking an input address with an output address. Comparisons among three blind signature based algorithms, Blind-Mixing, BlindCoin, and RSA Coin-Mixing, are conducted. It is determined that BlindCoin may be deanonymized because of its use of a public log. In RSA Coin-Mixing, a user's Bitcoins may be falsely claimed by another. In addition, the blind signature scheme of Blind-Mixing executes 10.5 times faster than that of RSA Coin-Mixing.